Mika McKinnon (mika.mckinnon@gmail.com)'s posts - Polish uPOST

On Saturday, for the first time, a rocket blasted off from the US West Coast to fling its payload on an interplanetary trajectory. Despite being at Vandenberg Air Force Base for Mars InSight’s historic launch atop an Atlas V rocket, I never saw the spacecraft before it tore free from Earth’s greedy grasp.

If all goes according to plan, NASA’s Mars InSight mission will launch this weekend from California. Onboard the Atlas V-401 rocket is the InSight lander, a nearly 800-pound machine loaded up with cameras, a robotic arm, a heat probe, and a seismometer that, for the first time, will allow us to examine the inner…

Peggy is something along the edge of Saturn’s ring, a glitch whose source we’ve never seen. Cassini took a last peek at Peggy during its Grand Finale destructive plunge, adding a final piece to the puzzle for future researchers to pore over when trying to understand this mysterious disturbance.

I’m baaaackkkk! Only kinda, but you’ll see my byline sneaking into Gizmodo occasionally as a freelancer. I was at JPL for Cassini’s final moments on Friday, so I’m here to help you mourn the loss of a truly great robot.

Yesterday morning, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft slammed into the day side of Saturn, the brief flash of its vaporization marking the end of a 13-year mission. But it took people to turn this hunk of aluminum and silicon into an extension of our curiosity.

Former-astronaut and io9 dreamguy Chris Hadfield is going on a cruise into the Arctic circle. He’s bringing an entire menagerie with him of scientists and entertainers, but now he’s looking for people to embed and report out on the experience. You know where this is going.

Just under two years ago, I stumbled onto Kinja and muddled through my first, poorly-structured, nearly-unreadable story. Hundreds of stories and millions of clicks later, it’s time to move on. Thank you, and I’ll miss you.

It’s taken half a century, but we’re finally getting a handle on our Sun’s complex magnetic field. A new model from NASA captures the strange surface interactions that create dramatic swirls of plasma and coronal mass ejections .If we can better understand the Sun’s magnetic field, we might one day be able to predict…

Parent-child relationships are challenging. They just get more complicated when the pair is father Morland Holmes, a universally-feared manipulator of global markets, and his renowned detective of a son, Sherlock.

Astronauts fired this small, rectangular hunk from the International Space Station today. The payload will separate into two autonomous satellites as part of a research program to take us one tiny step closer towards making asteroid mining a reality.

It’s hard to remember the beauty of winter when constantly shovelling walkways, scraping ice off cars, and tromping through freezing slush. That’s why it’s nice to get a view from above, far away from the chilly realities of the season.

Curiosity is busy poking and prodding the Bagnold Dunes, learning some new tricks in the first-ever interplanetary fieldwork on a sand dune. And of course it looks absolutely stunning while doing it in this latest sand dune selfie.

We’re openly obsessed with the assembly of the segmented origami mirror for the James Webb Space Telescope. A gorgeous photo released today reveals the secret of an enormous robotic arm used to place the mirror segments to within a paper’s width of perfection.